Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  Chapter

  The

  Spirit Spout

  Days melted into weeks, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.

  It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlit night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Persian perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.

  Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.

  This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

  Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas. Though we knew it not at the time, those who would have thus lost their lives would have been counted most fortunate.

  These temporary apprehensions, so thankfully vague, but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.

  But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

  Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

  Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of yore by Dias the Portagee; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.

  During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.

  So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together if he did but blink; he stood as one frozen with rictus face and hectic gaze. Meantime, the crew, driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock.

  Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw Ahab, sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair, but with head lolled back to its utmost in sleeping repose; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had just emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat.

  On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of, and next to that an empty vial rolled crazily hither and yon with the pitching of the ship. Though his body was erect, the head was thrown back, his staring open eyes were pointed fix
ed upon the needle of the tell-tale that swung there from a beam in the ceiling.[1] And yet did Ahab breathe in what seemed the deepest sleep.

  [1]The cabin-compass, called the tell-tale, is thus mounted below the binnacle compass so the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.

  Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder. In all this tumult thou sleepest thy hideous sleep; seeing not the black sky nor the raging sea; feeling not the reeling timbers and not hearing or at least not heeding the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is like to cleave the seas before him, leading him on to his doom, I fear, and the doom of us all. And yet here he lolls, with open eyes—Sweet Mother of Mercy!, who but a madman dost sleep with open eyes!—and in a gale besides.

  I know not whether to be in awe or revulsion, old man; as a mindless zomby, thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

  Ahab’s Log: Chapter

  Slouching from

  Santa Cruz

  Ahab’s log, September 19, 1851

  Ah, thou Pacific, we turn eastward to thee at last! Yon prolific sea rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, muscled Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; the tide-beating heart of earth.

  We make good speed toward thy storied waters, thou vast ocean, ye who even now embrace the putrid bulk of Moby Dick; I feel him luring us thither, as though some fist clutched my very stones, and by them he pullest me inexorably onward; this groping clutch didst thou feel one instant prior to Fedallah’s ethereal ululation from the masthead that first night Moby Dick’s foul spout was sighted, and deep in my midmost keel an ache awoke. Is this that mystic link that Fedallah didst endeavor to explain?

  Though I pile stuns’l upon stuns’l, yet still does he elude me! Were it only Ahab at the solitary helm, and Ahab in the rigging, and all Ahab slumbering there in the forecastle, then onward would we all push, but Ahab is not yet so mad as that. Though it galls thee, the Pequod must tarry for the taking of whales, if only to forestall mutinous thought; yon Pacific needs must await; thou must bide thy time, old man.

  That vast undulating typhoon-tossed body of water brings memory of death, dismemberment and worse to me! For yea though it doth surround the corpus of him I hate, yet does it also lap those shores where Ahab’s greatest folly was loosed upon the world. Oh, Santa Cruz, so recently and ironically wrested from Mexico’s breast with the advent of the undead host; would that California’s bandit ways did crush fair Caspar before he escaped thy outpost clutches. Oh, Death! why canst thou not sometimes be timely?

  When Ahab’s stump was yet bloody, raw and aching from the bone saw that did hack off the ragged end of thy masticated tibia, Fedallah appeared alongside the Pequod in some ancient scow, seeming to ooze from out the very substance of the world as the fog does ooze from the air in that region. He slithered aboard, made the crew to know he could grant Ahab succour would they but allow him to tend to that bloody stump; and as they were at wit’s end—for neither herbs nor other remedies they could obtain were in any way effectual against thy raging fever, worsening by the hour—they gladly assented.

  Fedallah didst appear aboard the Pequod at the behest of some ancient Persian prophecy, one to which he had devoted dozens of decades of study, for the prophecy identified Fedallah as agent and emissary to thou, Ahab, its chief mover. He spoke but little on this head, saying only that the signs were not entirely clear, but would become more so as the moment of thy apotheosis and his own drew nigh. Thy memory is vague and little stands out from that time but the feel of Fedallah’s cold touch on Ahab’s sweat-glossed forehead, and the taste of that bitter brew that hast become no less vile with time, but welcome just the same. And often dost the sweet face of Caspar swim up through thy hallucinations during that horrid time.

  Caspar, thy indispensable cabin boy, though he was no more boy than thou wert a woman; full seventeen years he had. Not overbright, but easily stomached for all his cheery good will; as a bright sun to thy dark thunderings was he. Had I but known the hell he would wreak upon the earth, despite my love for the lad, I would have given him a blow to stave his skull, thereby killing him but thereby also saving Ahab from the greater burden of damnation wrought by him; and with that killing would thou have also saved so many millions more from the blasted horror that now walkest about the wretched land. But hard down on that, old man, for that path was closed to thy vision; ye could not know what lay in store down that twisted path. Ah, sweet ignorance! Would that Fedallah had found Ahab prior to Caspar’s leave-taking, thereby sparing thee thy guilt and the foul duty ye are even now fulfilling; and thereby sparing also the world its wicked woe!

  Fedallah’s mysterious sources whispered that Caspar had spread the plague from Frisco up to the Oregon territory and thence back along that snaky Oregon trail as he whored his way eastward, moving with ever-sickening, ever-contagious pace to his family in Fort Caspar, a family he would never reach, for the lad was ignominiously despatched in a pass in the Owl Creek Mountains in the spring of 1848; done in by none other than Elija Black himself, ere he became the whispered legend told of today by that superstitious lot in the forecastle. A black day it was indeed when Ahab allowed the lad off the ship to send him homeward-bound with a blessing that was in sooth the foulest curse.

  Aye, thy fate hast launched thee at length upon those almost final Pacific waters, and as thy Pequod glides ever more nigh the Japanese cruising-ground whence Moby Dick devoured thy leg and took from thee thy humanity, thy purpose intensifies. Thy firm lips meet like the lips of a vice; the Delta of thy forehead’s veins swell like overladen brooks; in the depths of sleep, Starbuck tells thee that thy ringing cry runs through all the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts black blood!” Thankful should ye be, old man, that those other dreams cannot be heard; aye, those dreams Fedallah says bring whimpers to thy sleep-slackened lips; whimpers and pleading.

  Awake, thou art thine own; awake, thou art Ahab; awake, dost thou feel that clear spirit in thee; awake, dost thou feel thy purpose surge from sole of foot to lofty brow, coursing like clearest fire through the scar that connectest thy earthbound feet to the unbounded heaven that towers even now above thy crown.

  In the success of this voyage lies salvation, not for thee alone, but wrought also upon all ashore still plagued by the walking dead. If thy quest fails in its aim, the Pearly Gates will clang shut in thy teeth and Peter shall scoff and spit at thee and send thee hence to those other, hotter gates below, those that burnest with black flame in thy dreams.

  Aye, curséd dreams from a curséd dreamer, dreaming thy nightmare way across these waters; feel thy good ship turn her prow eastward as we at last make way toward the vast Pacific, and the death of Moby Dick!

  Chapter

  The Albatross

  Southeastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts—a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen—a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

  The craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment
that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

  “Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”

  But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his speaking-trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his own speaking-trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to—”